We wonder why!

Yesterday was a bad day. I wanted to know more about the bombings in Boston but every time I looked at the TV or read anything about those who had lost limbs I started to cry. It affected me more even than the deaths of the children in Newtown. We are strange creatures and we never know what will move us to tears and what will just have us shaking our heads and bemoaning the human condition. Although we've been told nothing yet about who might have perpetrated this horrific deed everyone speculates.  Peter King, the big-mouthed Republican congressman from New York, not unexpectedly, is blaming Al-Qaeda as are so many Americans on the right, but until we know it was foreign terrorists I am convinced it was done by one of our many right-wing maniacs: anti-abortion, anti-government, anti-anything, so long as they can blame minorities, particularly our dark-skinned president for everything that has gone wrong or will go wrong in our country.

On the same day of the bombings a report on the United States role in torture was released by an independent committee, which included Republicans and Democrats.  Here is part of what it said, as quoted in a New York Times editorial this morning:

"[A]s  long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United states could again engage in torture.” The task force found that using torture — like waterboarding, slamming prisoners into walls, and chaining them in uncomfortable stress position for hours — had “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” And in engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions, the United States violated its international treaty obligations. A detailed 22-page appendix cites dozens of legal cases in which the United States prosecuted similar treatment or denounced it as torture when carried out by other countries.

Brutality is not uncommon in warfare. But, as the panel notes, there never was before “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”
The panel further details the ethical lapses of government lawyers in the Bush years who served up “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations, and of medical professionals who helped oversee them. It is also rightly critical of the Obama administration’s use of expansive claims of secrecy to keep the details of rendition and torture from becoming public and to block victims’ lawsuits.

The report’s appearance all these years later is a reminder of the lost opportunity for a full accounting in 2009 when President Obama chose not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs. At that time, Mr. Obama said he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” But identifying past mistakes so they can be avoided is central to looking forward. The Constitution Project’s effort is a good step in that direction. But the portrait of what happened is still incomplete. For starters, a separate 6,000-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based on Central Intelligence Agency records, has yet to be declassified and made public. The next step should be its release. There is no excuse for further delay."

What I don't understand, and never will, is the perplexity of those Americans who wonder why we are hated throughout much of the world.  Hypocrisy does that to people.  We all know people who condemn the actions of others while at the same time they do the same or worse.  We never like such people and more often despise them, yet we've assumed that position as a country for ourselves: we are the gold standard of hypocrisy.  If the bombings do turn out to be foreign terrorists I know I won't be one of those wondering why although I will still cry when I think of the victims.  It's the home-grown terrorists that I don't understand, killing and maiming their own people.  And if the person(s) who did this, did it to protest a woman's choice, that would be beyond madness.  To take the lives of others to support a "pro-life" position is indeed cause for me to wonder. 

We shall see.